Is it legal to use Visual Studio Community edition at work, for personal use?

Question

_{Tuesday, July 18, 2017 10:21 PM}

Hi, as my title says, I'm wondering legal term.

My employer is in any terms, an 'enterprise' as the visual studio license specifies. And the company has definitely more than 5 developers who uses professional version (I mean, paid version) of Visual studio.

I'm a research engineer (in hydrodynamics / floating body motion), and my development is purely for post-processing of large sized output file from other software. And I don't think I will have any co-operation with other engineers in the company, because I am the only person who actually uses programming language for this purpose. Of course, my employer will never going to sell or license my post-processor. I started to develop these things in MinGW (for C-based dev) and Anaconda (if I need to use Python). None of these softwares are familiar to me, and especially MinGW, due to its old-fashioned way of UI, is pretty painful for me.

In this case,

i) Will it be legal to use VS community edition without payment?

ii) Will distributing part of my source in some public repository (such as GitHub), and declaring open source license for the code make my use of VS community edition legal? Actually, the whole source will be way too dirty and messed up, since I have to adjust constants and schemes every time I analyze different problems. I may open some of the sources that would be 'usable'.

I'm wishing for Yes for both of the question. If I must publicly distribute the "ALL" source files and its dependencies, I think I need to consider a bit unfamiliar tools (such as MinGW & Anaconda).

All replies (4)

_{Wednesday, July 19, 2017 5:19 AM ✅Answered}

Most of the answer depends on your company. They must give you permission.

The community version is free, why can't you use it? If the reason is that you don't have a computer of your own then again, you need permission from your company.

Note that you need official permission. If you think that they won't use your software but you don't have official permission then if management learns about it then they might say no, you don't own the software, they do. That does  of course depend on your country's laws too.

Sam Hobbs
SimpleSamples.Info

_{Wednesday, July 19, 2017 5:51 AM ✅Answered}

Hi Heewon.x,

Welcome to the MSDN forum.

As far as I know, you cannot use the VS community version in your work. Please have a look at this: Visual Studio Community 2017 License Terms and for the VS 2015 community, it is also similar like this scope.

>>If you are an enterprise, your employees and contractors may not use the software to develop or test your application, except for open source, Visual Studio extensions, and education purposes as permitted above.

Since you are in an enterprise and develop on it for the work requirement, even if you will not work with other colleagues or the company will not sell it, it seems not meet the free scope, sorry for this inconvenience.

If you just want to develop your personal application at home and not for the work or your company, you are an individual developer and you can use the free VS community version.

Meanwhile, you can check this similar issue: Is it legal for me to use Visual Studio Community Edition? and you can call 1-800-426-9400, Monday through Friday, 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. (Pacific Time) to speak directly to a Microsoft licensing specialist, and you can get more detail information from there, thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Sara

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_{Wednesday, July 19, 2017 9:21 AM}

Thank you for the answer and your time.

_{Wednesday, July 19, 2017 9:21 AM}

Thank you for the answer and your time.